Smell Gas? Emergency Steps Every Homeowner Should Know

Natural gas is odorless. The rotten-egg or sulfur smell you notice is mercaptan, added specifically so you can detect a leak. If you smell it, treat it as real every single time.

1. 1Get everyone out of the building immediately, including pets. Do not stop to gather belongings.
2. 2Do not touch anything electrical on the way out. No light switches, no thermostats, no appliances, no garage door opener. A switch contact can produce a spark.
3. 3Do not start a vehicle in an attached garage, and do not use the garage door opener to leave.
4. 4Do not use your phone inside the building. Make every call from well outside, ideally across the street.
5. 5Call the gas utility's emergency line and 911 from that safe distance. They respond to gas odor calls as emergencies and they do not charge you for it.
6. 6Do not go back inside for any reason until the utility says the property is safe.

• A hissing or whistling sound near a gas line, meter or appliance
• Dead or discolored vegetation in a line over a buried gas run, with no other explanation
• Bubbles rising in standing water over a buried line
• Physical symptoms in the household — headache, dizziness, nausea — that improve when everyone goes outside
• A gas appliance burning with a yellow or orange flame where it should burn blue

The gas utility's job is to make the property safe. They will locate the source, and if the leak is on their side of the meter they will repair it. If it is on your side — the house piping, an appliance connection, a buried line to a pool heater or outdoor kitchen — they will shut off service and tag it, and the repair is yours to arrange.

That is where we come in. Gas line repair is licensed, permitted, inspected work, and it should be. We locate the leak with electronic detection equipment, repair or replace the affected section, pressure test the system and hold it for the required duration, then coordinate the inspection and relight every appliance in the house.

In San Tan Valley homes the recurring causes are:

• Appliance connector failure. Flexible connectors age, and older ones can be uncoated brass that becomes brittle.
• Corrosion on buried lines. Underground runs to pool heaters, spas and outdoor kitchens are exposed to soil moisture and salts.
• Poor workmanship on a previous install. Improperly cut threads, missing sediment traps, or unbonded CSST are all things we find on other people's work.
• Physical damage. Someone digging without calling Blue Stake, or a line struck during landscaping or fence work.
• Undersized piping under load. Not a leak, but a related hazard — an appliance starved of gas can burn incompletely and produce carbon monoxide.

Carbon monoxide has no smell at all. It comes from incomplete combustion in a gas appliance — a blocked flue, a cracked heat exchanger, poor combustion air. You cannot detect it without a detector, and every home with gas appliances should have working CO alarms, including one near the sleeping areas.

A yellow-tipped flame on a burner that should be burning blue is a visible warning of incomplete combustion. So is soot around an appliance. Both deserve immediate attention.

• Have gas appliances and connections inspected periodically, especially older flexible connectors.
• Call Blue Stake before any digging, every time, including fence posts and tree planting.
• Use licensed, permitted contractors for any gas work — see gas line services. Unpermitted gas work is a serious problem when you sell and a much more serious problem if there is ever an incident.
• Keep working CO detectors on every level and near sleeping areas.
• If you are adding a large gas load — a pool heater, an outdoor kitchen, a tankless water heater — have the total BTU load calculated before you buy the appliance.

We do gas work throughout San Tan Valley including the outdoor-living-heavy neighborhoods like Copper Basin, and every job is permitted, pressure tested and inspected. That is not a selling point — it is the minimum standard for work that has to be right the first time.